Advertising and direct marketing have traditionally been used to acquire new customers for various products and services. Recently, Internet-based advertising and marketing have become common. Internet-based advertising typically charges a vendor a fee for each thousand users who view the advertising banner. Such fees are called cost-per-thousand (CPM) fees. If the prospective customer selects the banner advertisement, the prospective customer is commonly directed to the vendor""s Internet site or is presented with additional advertisements, coupons, or information. The hosting Internet site may randomly present a variety of banners to the various users or the hosting Internet site may rotate through the banners. Typically, less than 0.2% of the users of the site hosting the banner will select the banner. The vendor may also pay the Internet site hosting the banner a periodic fee or a per-click fee.
Companies, such as ValueClick, Inc., provide a performance-based advertising on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. Subscribers to ValueClick pay as a function of the number of times their banner advertisements are clicked on. For example, a vendor may pay the site hosting the banner $0.12 to $0.15 each time a user selects the banner.
Internet-based direct marketing allows a computer user to choose to receive marketing information for a particular vendor or for a particular subject matter. For example, a user may be asked if he wishes to receive marketing from a vendor when the computer user sign-up for an account at the vendor""s Internet site. Advertisements can be directed to users from a specific country or targeted to specific markets, such as automotive, business and finance, careers, consumer technology, E-community and portals, entertainment and media, family and lifestyles, games, health and fitness, MIS and IT, news and culture, E-commerce and shopping, sports and recreation, travel, and youth and students.
Traditional Internet advertisements and direct marketing are relatively costly on a per actual customer basis. A vendor may spend $400 to $700 in advertising and marketing fees for each customer the vendor actually receives as a result of traditional Internet advertisements and direct marketing. The cost of acquiring a customer via online advertising and marketing is approximately twice the cost of more traditional advertising. Vendors are estimated to have spent $182 billion on advertising and $350 billion on direct marketing in 2000. An estimated $7 billion will be spent by vendors on Internet advertising in 2000, increasing to $25 billion by 2004.
Internet-based portals and search engines, such as Lycos and Yahoo!, provide the capability to search for a product with specific features and to connect with retailers of the products. Such portals and search engines provide search services free of charge to the user and receive revenue from banner advertisements. Manufactures, such as Ford Motor Co., allow users to select products and features from the product offered by the manufacture. Internet sites, such as ActiveBuyersGuide.com""s, CompareItAll.com""s, and Point.com""s, provide automated selection tools that guide a user to products based on user provided criteria. Vendors pay ActiveBuyersGuide.com and Point.com as a function of monthly banner advertisement and licensing fees.
An automated selection tool can be programmed in conventional computer languages, such as C, C++, or JAVA. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, such as an expert system can be used. Applications using AI techniques, other than neural networks, tend to handle only conditions that the applications were preprogrammed to handle. For example, a rule-based expert system includes a set of rules and scenarios defined by a human expert. This limits the expert system to responding to only the situations contemplated by the expert at the time the expert system was developed.
Neural networks may used in automated selection tools because neural networks have the ability to infer new behavior based on past experience. Neural networks perform better at matching new situations based on past experiences than traditional programs that follow a chain of logical statements. Neural networks examine inputs concurrently rather than following a path through a chain of logical statements. Neural networks that use self organizing maps (SOM) are described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,920,852 to Graupe, which is incorporated herein by reference.
By way of introduction only, a computer network-based system and method of selecting preferred products includes using a neural network-based decision engine to automatically generate queries and select preferred products as a function of responses to the queries.
The foregoing discussion has been provided only by way of introduction. Nothing in this section should be taken as a limitation on the following claims, which define the scope of the invention.